KIMBERLY BALTZER-JARAY AND TANYA RODRIGUEZ · 2013-05-16 · 42 KIMBERLY BALTZER-JARAY AND TANYA RODRIGUEZ 4 Art bends, we tweak; art scoffs, we condemn. 5 Repeat. This cycle and

Tattoos – Philosophy for Everyone: I Ink, Therefore I Am, First Edition. Edited by Robert Arp.© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

K I M B E R L Y B A L T Z E R - J A R A Y

A N D T A N Y A R O D R I G U E Z

C H A P T E R 4

FLESHY CANVAS

The Aesthetics of Tattoos from Feminist

and Hermeneutical Perspectives

Mobile Art Gallery

In a joke from the late 1970s, George Carlin once referred to a heavily tattooed person as a ‘mobile art gallery,’ and further added that when ‘a guy like that dies, you don’t bury him, you stick him in a museum somewhere.’1 Carlin’s comedy never fails to get a laugh, whether about tattoos, dirty words, politics, or religion, but we have to ask: what are we laugh-ing at here exactly? Tattoo artistry and social acceptance of tattooed people has evolved so much since the 1970s, when Carlin originally cracked this joke. Tattoos are no longer only worn by society’s degenerates (e.g., prisoners, gangs, sailors) – they are for everyone and any-one. On TV, we see people from all walks of life getting tattooed by a member of the LA

Tattoos_c04.indd 38Tattoos_c04.indd 38 12/14/2011 9:11:10 PM12/14/2011 9:11:10 PM

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Ink or Miami Ink crews, and we see celebrities such as Megan Fox, Susan Sarandon, and Angelina Jolie showing off some ink on the red carpet. And of course we see many an inked musician, such as Lady Gaga, Pink, and Henry Rollins. But if all this is true, if tattoos have become so mainstream and acceptable as a significant art form, why is Carlin’s joke still funny? Maybe it’s the mental image of a dead person covered in colorful tattoos hanging in an art gallery next to the Mona Lisa or Starry Night. Or maybe it’s the idea of a person, scantily clad, walking about being appreciated by the public as if they were an install-ment at the Louvre. Whatever the silly imagining, one cannot deny that part of the humor here lies in the fact that many people don’t see tattoos as legitimate art or tattoo artists as ‘real’ artists like Dali, Van Gogh, or Rodin. But why is that? It seems that the only thing that distinguishes tattooing from other fine arts is the fleshy canvas its content appears on. Aye, there’s the rub.

‘Aesthetics’ is the branch of philosophy that concerns the definition and nature of art, beauty, and taste.2 In this paper, we first investigate a bit of feminist and hermeneutical aesthetics. Building upon these theories, we expand the discussion of art to include the fleshy canvas. We argue that a feminist philosophy of art suggests a sound theoretical framework by which one can maintain that skin art is just that – art. In its contemporary practice, tattooing has become a new form of art, and feminist theory provides context for interpretation. The tattooed body may agitate conventional conceptions of fine art – but art evolves, and history makes this much clear. Definitions of art tend to develop, as does artistic practice. Artistic innovations subvert what is old and stale within the institutional art world, while art theory empowers that subversion and provides a context for the appreciation of art. There is usually some initial resistance, of course, to this evolution – impressionism, cubism, and photography, for example, were initially met with criticism and even damnation by mainstream artists and art theorists of the time.3 Similarly, feminist aesthetics might seem subversive to some; yet, in our view, it serves the same end for tattoos, teaching us to see the skin painter’s art.

Of course, aesthetics concerns much more than definitions of art and beauty. One of the ways we value art is for its meaning and for the various interpretations of its message. This is where the second approach, her-meneutical aesthetics, can help. By picking up on the meaning of art, hermeneutical aesthetics takes us from a definition that includes the fleshy canvas to one that reveals its significance.


40 KIMBERLY BALTZER-JARAY AND TANYA RODRIGUEZ

The State of Aesthetic Theory

What is art, you ask? There are a few standard views we can look at here; among the most influential are formalist, expressionist, and institutional definitions of art. These theories emphasize totally different values in aesthetics: formalism attends to the form of the artwork, expressionism considers what is expressed by the artist and what emotions are elicited by those who experience the art, while the institutional theory includes audience appreciation, the approval of the art world, and art history and expertise as necessary parts of determining what art is. In spite of dra-matic differences in how they estimate value, however, each of these the-ories insists upon distinguishing between fine art and craft; that is, ranking ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.

Formalism in aesthetics is the view that what matters in art is form: color, composition, texture, size – all (and only) what can be seen or heard in the work itself: ‘The properties in virtue of which it is an art-work and in virtue of which it is a good or bad one – are formal merely, where formal properties are typically regarded as properties graspable by sight or by hearing merely.’4 Evaluating visual art, then, involves looking at it without reference to ‘external’ considerations. Clement Greenberg and Clive Bell are the most famous of its proponents. As art critics, they redirected audiences to appreciate line, color, pigment, and shape when people protested the lack of ‘realism’ in modern art.5 According to the formalist definition, art appreciation requires detachment – even from the notion that art should look like something recognizable. In one sense, formalist detachment acknowledges ‘artistic license’ and sets art free from the conventional task of representing (copying) things in the world.

Unfortunately, formalism also severely restricts the experience of art, since it does not attach aesthetic value to artistic intention, historical context, or social setting. More specifically, formalism excludes consid-eration of gender (it shouldn’t matter to the work who the artist is), artistic process (it isn’t relevant how the artwork was made, and why, where, or when), and utility (if it is supposed to have a function beyond being art, then it isn’t art). When artistic merit is limited to form or beauty, art undervalues objects with any practical use.6 As Carolyn Korsmeyer points out, feminists have scrutinized the category of fine art ‘because its attendant values screened out much of women’s creative efforts or actively dissuaded their attempts to practice certain genres.’7 In other words, historically, women put their creativity into making useful


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things (quilts, for example); as a result, their work was considered craft, not high art.

While formalists emphasize formal beauty in art, expressionist theories advocate the view that art is an expression of genius. Korsmeyer describes it as ‘a kind of personal expression that externalizes the vision of the individual artist in a work of autonomous value.’8 For philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and other expressionists, art communicates the significance of human existence.9 Thus, expression is not merely subjective – it communicates universally, not only expressing the artist’s thoughts, intentions, beliefs, feelings, and so on but also eliciting thoughtful and emotive responses from those who experience the art.

A discussion of extensive scholarship on what exactly is expressed by expressionist art is not possible here, but one theme stands out that is relevant for our work in this chapter. Thalia Gouma-Peterson makes the interesting observation that there is a ‘confrontation between the submis-sive female nude and the sexual-artistic will of the male artist.’10 If you have any doubts about this particular expressive theme, consider female nudes by Delacroix, Ingres, Munch, Miro, Picasso, and de Kooning; not to mention Degas, Manet, and Renoir. Unfortunately, we often mistake ‘masculine’ values for universal ones: ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’11

Unlike expressionist aesthetics, which prescribe what art should be, institutional theory aims to describe art as it is. According to the institutional aesthetic theorist George Dickie, a work of art, in the purely descriptive sense, is anything ‘upon which some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.’12 A thing is art (though not necessarily good art) simply because people label it as such. Arthur Danto, famous art critic, philosopher, and institutional theorist, offers a slightly more demanding version: theory makes the difference between art and non-art. He writes, ‘To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.’13 The institutional theory explains why we want to call Andy Warhol’s ‘Brillo Boxes’ art but not the package of Brillo boxes sitting on the grocery shelf. It also acknowledges the cycle of art history, which goes something like this:

1 Art puzzles us, so we come up with a definition.2 Art bends the rules, and so we tweak them.3 Art defies the rules, and we redefine.



4 Art bends, we tweak; art scoffs, we condemn.5 Repeat.

This cycle and the people involved make up the art world. Of course, the art world that institutional theorists describe happens to be male-dominated, upper-class, educated, and set primarily in the context of industrialized nations.

Formalism, expressionism, and the institutional theory each offer definitions of art; unfortunately, as we have just noted, these definitions interpret art in ways that have been particularly damaging. Interestingly enough, for the most part these theoretical positions exclude tattoos as art for the same reasons they excluded art as practiced historically by women. Since the art world exists in public, it excludes non-public art. Historically, women’s lives were in the domestic – private – realm. Embroidery and quilting, for example, would have been inappropriate activities for social gatherings.14 Similarly, the body occupies a private sphere; and, as a result, public displays of tattoos become acts of vulgarity.

So, while formalistic, expressionistic, and institutional aesthetic theo-ries enrich our understanding of canonical art, they also can be a source of class divisions, patriarchy, and ethnocentrism. Such effects demon-strate more than practical flaws of an ideal system. Symptoms on this scale indicate a theory in need of revision.

The Female Fleshy Canvas: Body Art

from a Feminist Perspective

The tattoo artist produces a beautiful work on someone’s body using a stencil, ink, and needles, instead of brushes and paint on a canvas. Consider a tattoo of some natural thing. With this kind of tattoo we are aware of nature in a twofold way: not only can the subject matter of tattoos be found in the natural world – for example tattoos of roses or koi fish – but the flesh these tattoos are inked into is also itself a living, breathing, feeling thing of nature. Beautiful art can happen on a variety of living things, of course; one can decorate a tree or paint a face, but these kinds of art are applied to the surface, not injected into the living nature itself like a tattoo is. Once the tattoo is executed, it moves with the skin, becomes a part of the flesh, and can even change shape, expression, or color with movement or over time. In this way, the art becomes one


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with nature. This very fact comes into account when we judge the beauty of a tattoo since it must not only resemble its original object but must be properly placed on the body, sized for the wearer, and not be distorted badly with movement. Here, it seems size and technique matter.

According to Carolyn Korsmeyer, one of the significant ways in which feminist artists defy expectation is ‘the presentation of the body as a component of art.’15 This trend is more than mere defiance, however. By using her own body within the work, the artist takes control of the rela-tionships found between artist, artwork, and audience. Consider the fact that in the Modern Arts section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City some eighty five percent or so of the nude pieces feature females while around five percent of the artists are women.16 Looking at a woman’s body depicted in an artwork, the audience attends to the for-mal properties such as color, light, and balance. Formal properties exist on only on the surface and formalist aesthetics privileges surface over all else. Beauty, according to formalist definitions, also exists on surfaces. Art that depicts mere surface renders the body passive and subservient, and the tendency, then, is for viewers to ‘objectify’ a woman by focusing on her body as a mere object. Conversely, when the artist uses her own body within the work, she compels the audience to confront her agency. The artist’s intention imparts subjectivity to the body; we become aware of the person revealed by the surface.

What is the standard of taste for tattoos? The dominant tradition insists that the significance of art comes from its universal value, not its individual value. Judgments of taste are supposed to be detached from individual concerns without objective significance. Tattoos, however, are often thick with personal meaning and private symbolism. Social stigma insinuates a contradiction and sees a ‘will to vulgarity’ in body art.17 The illustrated female body is even more subversive since tattoos have often been predominantly a male body art. And, consider Iris Marion Young’s insightful claim that a ‘woman’s social existence’ can be summed up as the ‘object of the gaze of another, which is a major source of her bodily self-reference.’18 A tattooed woman redefines beauty on her own terms, according to her individual taste. Sadly, individual taste holds little merit in traditional philosophy; universal taste holds all the stock. Deference to convention has dominated aesthetic theory and disregarded our personal experience with art. By contrast, Anita Silvers points out that feminism ‘addresses this connection with such intensity that it famously elides the personal with the political.’19 Women with ink make an artistic statement unavailable to men. The female fleshy canvas participates in a distinct



category of art, creating its own feminist aesthetic. The tattooed woman says, ‘You want to look at my body? I’ll give you something to look at!’ Like other feminist artists, she asserts agency, directing the gaze according to her will.

Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Tattoos:

Play, Festival, and Symbol

‘Hermeneutics’ is the study of interpretation theory (either as ‘art of ’ or ‘theory and practice of’ interpretation), and ‘hermeneutical aesthetics’ focuses on human experience and interpretation of art. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy so eloquently puts it:

Hermeneutical aesthetics regards aesthetic appearance not as a distraction from the real, but as the vehicle through which real subject matters reveal themselves. It over-turns the notion that art works are at one remove from reality. Hermeneutical aesthetics is dialogical in character. It recognizes that practitioner and theoretician share in bringing a subject matter to light and plays down any theory/practice division in the arts. Interpretation is a means to a work’s realization.20

We think that hermeneutical and feminist aesthetics share a common goal in that both seek to account for modern forms of art that traditional aesthetics leaves behind, for example the body art of tattoos. However, hermeneutical aesthetics can account for value beyond the scope of feminist aesthetics altogether because it explains why tattoos are valuable and outlines the significant role tattoos have in advancing the art-historical narrative.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) put forward one of the most developed hermeneutical philosophical methods in Western philosophy, and his aesthetics offers a deconstruction of the traditional philosophy of art and beauty, as well as a construction of a theory that wishes to focus on the cognitive ways in which we experience art and the meanings we come away with when encountering art.21 For Gadamer, something worthy of being deemed ‘art’ has the power to say something directly to us: art addresses us and makes a claim. This claim can be shock, surprise, anger, excitement, or joy – any emotion we are capable of feeling. The experience of art is an experience of meaning, one that can only come about through and with understanding, and the relationship


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we have with art is ongoing and deep. One is never a disinterested onlooker when approached by art; instead, one is deeply affected and has a dialogue with the work in which understanding is constantly renegotiated. The deeply invested involvement we have with art is demonstrated by three analogies in Gadamer’s work: play, festival, and symbol.

Art as play

Art puts something into play: a witness to art (e.g., an audience member at a drama play) shares a similarity with sport spectators in that they are both immersed, drawn into something bigger than what is simply presented to consciousness. To be immersed in something is to surrender to it, to be caught up in it. Comparing art to a game also serves to show that:

1 Traditional views that ground the interpretation of art in the artist’s own subjectivity are inappropriate and do not reveal what goes on in the subjectivity of the viewer;

2 Art is not understood with sole reference to the equipment, tools, methods, or medium – it is more than that; and

3 Like a game, art requires an appreciation of the rules or conventions, but its lifeblood is not solely in those rules or conventions.

In short, art cannot be reduced to intention, materials, or conventions.Now, taking this into consideration, we think Gadamer would agree

that tattoos are properly works of art for the following two reasons. First, a tattoo’s beauty cannot be reduced to intention, materials, or conventions. A tattoo is more than the ink, more than the needle, and more than the intentions of the artist or the wearer. As much as a well-placed, well-sized, well-executed tattoo can make the skin on which it appears more enticing, the tattoo’s beauty cannot be purely reduced to the skin it is within or the fact it appears within skin at all.

Second, tattoos do make a claim on the person who witnesses them, and this claim can be any range of emotions, from shock or outrage to joy or erotic stimulation. The experience of a tattoo is one of meaning, and often there are various meanings discovered that relate to one’s own experiences, cultural background, or taste. The quality of the meaning you walk away with after experiencing a tattoo has as much to do with what you bring to the table. When one sees a tattoo, the first moment is



often taken up by figuring out what it is of and the second moment by trying to figure out what it means (i.e., what it says in itself and of the person it is on); then one feels a judgment of quality or taste. Another moment of deep investment is felt when you find the tattoo makes you want to know more about the person wearing it: What does it mean to them? Did they create it or find it? How was their experience of being tattooed? And so on. From this, we see the dialogical nature of tattoos, and in fact this can go from an inner dialogue (your mind and the work of art) to an outer dialogue with the other person (i.e., we see a sense of community and connection with others).

Art as festival

As much as art has a very intimate, individuating aspect, it is also a way in which the witness to art participates in something beyond themselves, something communal. The individual comes to stand in a relationship with others, united in a shared interest in what the work has to say. People forget the everyday trials and tribulations of their individual lives to come together in the experience of the art, and this once again speaks to its power. The analogy of festival also reveals a horizon of meanings: Art’s communicative capacity brings about the realization that, in as much as I understand art making its claim on me personally, I must acknowledge that I already belong to something larger than myself – I am indebted to past and to future communities of meaning. The meanings present have been there before me, and new ones will eventually come about after me. This is what Gadamer calls the ‘hermeneutic collective.’

There are a few ways in which tattoos exhibit the festival. First, tattooed people and tattoo artists often form a community among themselves, to share in the experience and the significance of tattoos and celebrate all things tattooed. Once you get a tattoo, you join that community and running across someone else who is tattooed becomes a moment of shared experience: You share in the feelings about getting tattooed, you share in the appreciation of the image and the craft, and you share the meanings involved for you both personally. Sometimes we even see portions of society gathering to dislike or shun tattooed people – a darker sense of community but a community nonetheless, coming together to respond to the claim made by art.

Second, in getting a tattoo you realize that you are part of something larger than yourself. In one sense, this is in the fact that tattoo is an art form that has been around for a long time, in different cultures and for


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different purposes – there are many different reasons for getting tattooed. Tattoo has a history. In another sense, you recognize that the meanings bound up in tattoo images are horizontal: you know that each image had some meaning before, that it has a meaning now, and that a new meaning will evolve. A tattooed person also knows that their tattoo can change meanings as they travel into different nations, cultures, age groups, or races. A great example concerns Russian prison tattoos, which has a spe-cific meaning and status in Russia and yet in the West is exotic and cul-turally different. traveling around Canada with Russian prison tattoos would be a completely different experience than traveling around Russia or Ukraine. In recognizing these things about tattoos, you realize that you are a part of a collective, sometimes even more than one.

Art as symbol

On this subject Gadamer begins with some Greek, speaking to the origins of the word ‘symbol’ (συ′μβολον, sýmbolon) as a token of remembrance. A ‘symbol’ was an object broken into two pieces, with one piece given to the house guest in the hopes that later the two pieces could be re-joined in an act of recognition – recognition of something known to the people involved. It is a fragmentary promise of completeness (wholeness) at a future moment, which has an abundance of meaning. Symbols are speculative in this way. The symbol also does not refer to something outside itself; rather, it presents its own meaning, and an indeterminate one at that. This is another side to its connection with speculation – any statement pertaining to the meaning of a symbol brings forth more than is actually spoken. As Nicholas Davey puts it in the Stanford Philosophical Encyclopedia:

The ‘speculative’ capacity of an image or word concerns its ability to sound out or insinuate the unstated nexus of meanings which sustain a given expression but which are not directly given in it. The speculative power of an image or phrase has something in common with the sublime: it illuminates in the spoken or visual image a penumbra of unstated meanings whose presence can be sensed but never fully grasped or conceptualized.22

Hence, a work of art is never fully exhausted by the symbols that carry it, but does not exist apart from those who or that which sustain it. The symbol resonates with suggestions of meanings, and at the same time we are also presented with the notion that not all is given to us. There is an excess of meaning in an artwork, and simultaneously there is the promise of more meaning, and the promise of there being other meanings.



An artwork is not reducible to its history, or to its situation within a movement or genre. Its meaning is not immediately apparent to us and is impossible to fully interpret, and yet we turn to art in search of significance, something that completes the puzzle of our lives or existence. The point to be gained here is that, while art is symbolic, it does not stand for something else, or for some hidden impersonal meaning that needs to be explained. Art as symbol involves an act of self-recognition, in which we approach it seeking to understand ourselves.

Tattoos are symbols in this very sense, and like art tattoos are excessively filled with meaning and bring the promise of more to come. The promise of completeness or full understanding is felt when you have the urge to ask the person what the tattoo means to them, and even after you get the answer the meaning for yourself is never exhausted. Tattoos are also sublime in that their meanings are never fully fixed or determined, and this is true whether the tattoo is an image or script. When we gaze upon a tattoo, we do so in self-reflection – whether in admiration, inspiration, shock, or disgust – but all roads lead to self-reflection. Some people admire the art and dream of similar things for themselves, while others realize or reaffirm that tattoos are not for them. Either way, self-reflection is involved and what is sought is a better understanding of ourselves through the work of art on the skin before us.

Art Cannot Change the World, but it Can Influence

Those Who Will

As these wise words painted on the wall of a tattoo shop23 suggest, tattoos themselves may not change the world but the ‘mobile art gallery’ sitting beside you on the bus just might. We can laugh at Carlin’s humor because it uses irony to reveal a social and aesthetic injustice, one that continues today (albeit to a lesser degree): Tattoo body art, as much as it should be considered beautiful art for reasons we have argued here, remains unaccepted by traditional and mainstream aesthetics. However, tattoos and the artists who create them have the power to change the art world and the conventions that surround it. They can also reveal to us new levels of meaning and experience, and novel ways in which we can come together as a community. So, we can laugh with Carlin and celebrate tattoos as artwork, but let’s keep the beautiful tattooed dead bodies out of the museum.


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NOTES

1 George Carlin, ‘Tattoos,’ The Little David Years Volume 7, 1971–1977 (New York: Atlantic Records, 1999), disc 7, no. 2.

2 Besides Thomas Adajian, ‘The definition of art,’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition), good introductions to aesthetics include Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Stephen Davies, The Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); and Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

3 See, for example, the accounts and analyses put forward in Grant Pooke and Diana Newall, Art History: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2008). Also, scholars such as Clement Greenberg have helped the world to understand and appreciate artwork that at first blush has struck people as bizarre or distasteful; see Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist painting,’ in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 5–10.

4 James Shelley, ‘The concept of the aesthetic,’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/aesthetic-concept).

5 Ibid. Key works include Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958) and Greenberg, ‘Modernist painting.’

6 Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Feminist aesthetics,’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/feminism-aesthetics).

7 Ibid. 8 Most notably, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For an overview, see Jean-Philippe

Deranty, ‘Existentialist aesthetics,’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/aesthetics-existentialist).

9 Ibid.10 Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, ‘The feminist critique of art

history,’ The Art Bulletin 69, 3 (1987): 340.11 Ibid.12 George Dickie, ‘The institutional theory of art,’ in Noel Carroll (ed.), Theories

of Art Today (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 93.13 Arthur Danto, ‘The artworld,’ The Journal of Philosophy 61, 19 (October,

1964): 580. For more on the institutional theory/art world approach, see ARE TATTOOS ART?(Chapter 3).

14 ‘No matter how feminists may try to harness women’s craft production into an arena of significance, the very vocabulary of modernism is exclusive of



the conditions of production, reception, and distribution and the incumbent meanings of the majority of women’s made images/objects in the past’ (Tamar Garb, ‘Engaging embroidery’: A review of Parker, The Subversive Stitch in Art History, The Art Bulletin 69, 3 (September, 1987): 131).

15 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 119.

16 See The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (New York: Penguin Books, 1998). The Guerrilla Girls explain, ‘Asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund in New York, we welcomed the chance to do something that would appeal to a general audience. One Sunday morning we conducted a “weenie count” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display.’ The result? ‘Less than 5% of the artists hanging in the Modern and Contemporary Sections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were women, but 85% of the nudes were female.’ And things are not getting better: see http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/venicewallf.shtml.

17 William Ian Miller, ‘Upward contempt.’ Political Theory 23, 3 (1995): 476–499.18 Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and

Other Essays (Malden, MA: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 39.19 Anita Silvers, ‘Feminism: An overview,’ in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia

of Aesthetics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 161–167.20 Nicholas Davey, ‘Gadamer’s aesthetics,’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics).

21 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003).

22 Davey, ‘Gadamer’s aesthetics.’23 This phrase is painted on the wall of Nighthawk Tattoo & Gallery in Guelph,

Ontario, Canada.


Documents

KIMBERLY BALTZER-JARAY AND TANYA RODRIGUEZ · 2013-05-16 · 42 KIMBERLY BALTZER-JARAY AND TANYA RODRIGUEZ 4 Art bends, we tweak; art scoffs, we condemn. 5 Repeat. This cycle and